Chilling yet beautiful and moving
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Having recently read this novel for the second time, I found myself as moved and unnerved upon completing it as I had been the first time I picked it up little over a year ago. For me, 'Never Let Me Go' remains a uniquely beautiful and yet deeply disturbing evocation of the loss of childhood wonder and innocence in the face of a harsh and indifferent world. Truly, this is one of the most remarkable novels published in recent years.
The 31 year old narrator looks back on her childhood at Hailsham in a stripped down matter of speech and with a relevancy and immediacy that evaporates the long and blunting passage between childhood and adulthood and which allows us to see in sharp, chilling contrast what is really lost in that painful transition. From an initial outlook of innocence and confusion at the world and yet hope for whatever meanings and possibilities it might have for each of as individuals, our spirits are gradually worn down to the realities of the world as it is revealed for adults - cold and indifferent, a place where as individuals we matter for little. Not only is it a place where our lives are inevitably destined to be short and mediocre, our increasing knowledge of the world through science seems to show ourselves to have been thrown into an utterly blind and mechanical universe, a place in which even the most fudamental human values of love, altruism and friendship are ultimately no more than bleak evolutionary algorithims, our very souls simply fictions written by our selfish genes.
Many people seem to find this novel difficult to get into. I can only say that it is worth perservering with. In fact, if you can, try to read it in one go, or at least in as few sittings as possible. Your reward might be to rediscover a memory of your childhood self that the passing of time has diminished and eroded, but has not, you will be moved to find, completely destroyed. The genius of Kazuo Ishiguro is not simply to restore something that you thought had forever gone away, but to unnervingly make you question how easily you could ever have let it go.
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